Category Archives: Philosophy
Darkly Wise and Rudely Great
Imagine you are a great historical scientist and discover a disturbing truth about nature. Perhaps you discover that the world is not flat like a map, but in fact round like a tomato. Or, maybe you discover that instead of the Earth having a special place at the center of the universe, it is a just an ordinary rock floating in space – distasteful and troubling revelations.
The naturalist, Charles Darwin, was in such a situation in 1859. Although a devout Christian, Darwin’s pursuits led him to discover the mechanism by which life on Earth developed from a common ancestor, leading to the obvious conclusion that humans evolved from their closest relatives, the great apes. It was the most disgusting idea of the century, and he was personally troubled by it for the rest of his life.
The path Darwin’s life took made him a likely candidate to discover the mechanism of evolution. He had an obsessive-compulsive personality, avidly collecting and cataloging beetles and other insects around his home. And, his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had already put forth the idea of common ancestry in a poem 60 years earlier:
“The Temple of Nature”
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
was born and nors’d in ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minuk, unsceen by spheric glass,
move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass.
These, as successive generations bloom
New powers arquire and larger limbs assume
whence countless groups of vegatation spring.
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.-Erasmus Darwin 1802
Most auspiciously, his family was affluent. His father, frustrated with Charles’ unending curiosity and lack of direction, eventually agreed to let him travel abroad with the HMS Beagle even though he considered it to be a complete waste of time. Darwin’s writings of the journey solidified his position as a well respected and well connected member of the scientific community.
He became close friends with Charles Lyell and John Dalton Hooker, the most influential geologist and botanist of his time respectively. Through Lyell, he came to see the natural world as a gradually changing process. Hooker was a trusted confidante with whom he could share some of his troubling revelations. After writing his first essay on natural selection, Darwin told Hooker it was like “confessing a murder”. Hooker gave him the calm, critical feedback Darwin needed to proceed.
The final push came from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace who wrote his own version of natural selection in 1858, ahead of Darwin. Both Darwin and Wallace had been inspired by the ideas of the Reverend Thomas Malthus who promoted the idea that population outstrips food supply, and both came to similar conclusions about how this creates selection pressure in nature. Hooker and Lyell arranged to have some of Darwin and Wallace’s ideas presented at a conference in 1858. This inspired Darwin to kick into high gear and finish “The Origin of Species” within a year, unleashing the most consistent and comprehensive explanation of natural diversity ever conceived, then and since.
Darwin did not doubt the literal translation of the bible as a young man, but bravely came to question the nature of the Christian God after observing nature in detail. His attitude was well summarized by his observations of the Ichneumonidae wasp. He wrote:
“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”
-Charles Darwin 1860
Like Copernicus’ realization 350 years earlier that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, Darwin’s theory of natural selection pressed heavily against the religious views of his time. Though the religious conflict was never fully resolved in his own mind, Darwin lived to witness his theory gain acceptance in the scientific world and among much of the general public before his death in 1882.
Darwin might have found some solace in the poet Alexander Pope who foresaw the impingement of science upon religion. In “An Essay on Man”, Pope describes Man as passionate and ignorant, existing between God and beast, and that science is a valuable tool for understanding our nature, but not useful in answering religious questions:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall:
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.- Alexander Pope 1734
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The Edge of Life
In 1971, computer networks were a relatively new concept, and so it occurred to Bob Thomas, an engineer working at BBN Tech that it would be neat to write a program than could traverse these networks on its own, forever copying itself onto other machines. The “Creeper” was born. Unknowing users would login to their terminals and be presented with the text “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!”. After logging in, the program would attempt to connect to other machines on the network and move itself to a new system. Although the term “computer virus” had not yet been coined, Bob Thomas had had managed to create the first one. He later wrote the complimentary “Reaper” program to seek out and shut down any Creeper programs out in the network.
Frederick Cohen’s research at USC in 1983 brought the idea of a computer virus to the mainstream. He developed a program that attempted to spread by attaching itself to commonly used programs on a shared computer system. Within minutes, Cohen’s program would spread through the file system and gain complete control. Cohen believed that his program was alive in the literal sense because it met the requirements for life: it was a pattern capable of reproducing, it could make use of the metabolism of its host (the computer), and it adapted to its environment, installing itself opportunistically.
The “Strong Claim” of Artificial Life says that any definition of life that includes all biological forms will necessarily include some computer-based systems as well, and these systems must therefore be considered actually alive. When the field of Artificial Life was formed in 1987, scientists agreed that computer viruses were indeed the most likely candidate to meet the strong claim. The opposite “weak claim” states that no matter how lifelike programs become, they will only ever be simulations of life, not instances of it.
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The Dynamical Approach
In the field of Artificial Intelligence, it is assumed that the brain is a type of computer: it can read inputs from the senses, represent the world symbolically, compute plans, and take action. Cognitive processes are represented as a kind of flow chart. But does the brain really function like a computer? The computer model does not take into account the fact that the brain activity is a continuous, time-dependent process. Unlike a computer program which is fed a problem, computes an answer at some future time, then waits for the next problem, the human brain may be more like a “dynamical system” that is continuously processing and interacting with the environment in real-time while maintaining a stable but ever-changing state.
The philosopher Tim van Gelder used the following example to contrast the computational vs. dynamical descriptions of cognition. Consider the problem of regulating the speed of a steam engine. Steam pressure driving the engine may fluctuate and we need to make sure it turns at a constant speed. The computational approach would involve adding sensors to measure the current speed of the engine, feeding this data into software that represents the engine symbolically with variables and equations, computing the required throttle adjustment, and finally at some later time, signalling the throttle to open or close by a specific amount. This process would then repeat ad infinitum.
The dynamical approach to regulating a steam engine was in fact invented in 1788 by James Watt and is called a centrifugal governor. The engine is connected to a spindle that spins with the engine. The spindle has arms with weights hanging off them such that when the engine speed increases the spindle spins faster causing the weights to move outward due to centrifugal forces thus raising the arms. The arms are connected to the throttle such that as they raise up, the throttle begins to close. Similarly, when the arms move to a lower position (when the engine is spinning slowly) the throttle opens up. The result is an engine that works at a constant speed despite the changes in input energy.
Van Gelder points out that this solution is remarkable because it solves a seemingly computational problem in a non-computational way: there is no flowchart, no procedure or steps to complete, and no symbols. More importantly, the system responds in real-time to changes in the environment without waiting for computations to complete. By using a direct, real-time, continuous feedback loop (the engine controls the position of the arms, and the position of the arms controls the engine) the system maintains stability. Is it then possible that the human brain, a seemingly computational device, can actually be explained in a similarly non-computational way using a dynamical approach?
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The Pooping Duck
The quest to create mechanical creatures goes back to the ancient Greeks, but the concept experienced a revival at the end of the Renaissance. Around 1640, Descartes put forth the idea that the human body works like a machine and could be understood as such. The idea that nature can be viewed as a mechanical process was solidified in 1687 when Newton published his Principia. In it, he describes in detail how nature follows mathematical rules. Indeed, Newton viewed the universe as a massive clock built by God and set into motion. These ideas were a precursor to the Industrial Revolution and also made clockwork automata a fad in Europe in the early 18th century.
Jacques Vaucanson [1709-1782] was an unsung hero of the Industrial Revolution. The invention of the mechanical loom is usually credited to Joseph Jacquard, but it was Vaucanson who first came up with the idea of using punchcards to store textile patterns, a technology that would be used in the first computers 200 years later. Vaucanson also build the first functioning automaton, a mechanical flute player that emulated a human being. The lips and fingers of the player moved naturally on the flute, and he painstakingly copied the musculature and breathing of a human. Its breath could be felt emanating from the mouth as it played.
After the success of the flute player, Vaucanson built an automated tambourine player, and finally his most famous work, a mechanical duck in 1738. The duck was made of gilded copper and contained over 400 moving parts hidden from view. The duck could drink, eat, quack, splash about and even defecate. Vaucanson used a new high-tech material, rubber, to design the ducks digestive system, and thus developed the world’s first flexible rubber tube. It was later discovered that the duck did not actually defecate as the “feces” were stored in a separate compartment, but this did not diminish the magnitude of his masterpiece.
Vaucanson was a showman and toured througout Europe with his duck, charging admission and wowing audiences with his creation. No-one had ever before seen a mechanism which appeared so alive. He eventually caught the attention of the French government who hired him as inspector of the manufacture of silk. It was during this time he invented the first fully automated loom which used punch cards, the machine later improved upon by Jacquard. The silk workers of Lyon rebelled against Vaucanson’s automatic loom by pelting him with stones in the street, insisting that no machine could replace them. This foreshadowed the later anti-industrial sentiment of the Luddite movement in Britain. Vaucanson’s original automata were lost to history, but a replica of the duck is now kept in the Musee des Automates in Grenoble, France.
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The Rapture of the Geeks
If you plot all the important events that have occurred in the history of planet Earth on a chart, you’ll notice an interesting trend. The time between these events appears to get shorter and shorter as you get closer to the present day.
According to a group of scientists led by Ray Kurzweil, around the year 2045, the time between major technological advances will be so short that humanity will experience a cataclysm called the technological singularity. Machines will become more intelligent than humans and start to program themselves to become even more intelligent, creating a sort-of “intelligence explosion.” Nanotechnology will be completely integrated into our brains, enhancing us into a trans-human state. Kurzweil has even founded a non-profit institution, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, to investigate the the impending phenomenon and gathers various scientists and futurists together each year at the Singularity Summit.
Naturally, there are many skeptics. The Pulitzer-Prize winning academic, Douglas Hofstadter, who regularly attends the Singularity Summit has said, “I don’t think it’s inconceivable that some kind of singularity entity could eventually have superior intelligence to humans, but I’d be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened in the next 100 to 200 years.” The futurist, Theodore Modis, has claimed that technological innovation is actually in decline. Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, makes some interesting observations of Kurzweil’s charts of the singularity: according to the mathematical model, the singularity should be happening NOW, not in 40 years. Further, one could make the same statement at any point in history. During the industrial revolution, for example, one could have claimed that a singularity should have been happening THEN.
The major claim from the Singularity Institute is that it is not possible to make predictions about what will happen after the singularity occurs. Once humans “cross over,” we will forever be changed, integrated with technology, absorbed by it, or destroyed by it. No one can know. However, Kurzweil believes we will become immortal. Our minds will no longer be dependent on our bodies. We will be able to download, migrate, enhance, or repair our minds at will, forever living within the cradle of high technology.
This idea, along with the insistence that the world is fundamentally going to change on a specific future date, has caused some to point out similarities between the technological singularity and The Rapture, and so it has been called “The Rapture of the Geeks.” Kurzweil is considered a longevity expert and has written about it in his book “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.” The idea is, if you can just live just long enough to make it to the singularity, then you’ll live forever.
It should come as little surprise that the idea of the technological singularity is based heavily in science fiction. Vernor Vinge wrote several sci-fi novels about the concept and first introduced the term “singularity” to describe it (taking it from the field of physics). Its a compelling idea, and the dystopian future of robots taking over is such a familiar theme that the idea of the singularity is easy to accept on the surface. It’s clear we live in a unique time period in the history of the planet. But, whether such publications should sit on the shelf of popular science or science fiction is still open to debate.
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The Artificial Artist
In his thirties, Harold Cohen wondered how long he could keep creating new artwork. Would his inventiveness run dry someday? Deciding that it might, he started teaching everything he knew to a computer, an effort that has so far lasted over 40 years. Cohen’s brainchild is AARON, a program that can automatically generate artwork following the guidelines Cohen has hand-coded.
AARON can’t learn anything on its own. It doesn’t contain a magic formula which generates human artistic creativity. AARON is essentially an expert system (a computer program with lots and lots of specific rules on how to do something programmed by an expert in the field). Though AARON relies on Cohen to hand-code the rules, AARON is capable of generating virtually unlimited supply of unique pieces of art in a given style. Samples of AARON’s work have been exhibited in galleries around the world.
But, is it Art? Some philosophers claim that art is something that only humans can make, therefore what AARON does is not art by definition. Cohen says that although AARON is not intelligent or self-aware, it is still doing something that we previously believed required thought. He leaves us with an interesting question. If AARON is not thinking or creating art, what IS it doing?
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The Chinese Room
The field of Artifical Intelligence (AI) was born in 1956. Just after the first practical computers were built, scientists and philosophers began to examine the consequences. Could computers ever match or exceed human intelligence? Could they ever have conscious awareness? Many believed so and promoted the strong AI hypothesis that computers could possess real minds in the full and literal sense. Then in 1980, the American philosopher, John Searle, made his now famous “Chinese Room” argument against the possibility of strong AI which still remains a thorn in the side of strong AI philosophy.
The argument is as follows: a man sits inside a locked room and is only able to communicate with the outside world by exchanging written messages under the door. Worse, all the messages must be in Chinese and he only understands English. Fortunately, someone left him a large instruction manual, a set of rules he should follow. The rules tell him that when he receives a message with certain kinds of squiggles, he should reply with other kinds of squiggles — they are instructions on how to respond without actually explaining what the Chinese characters mean. By following the rules, he is able to write complete sentences and even have intelligent conversations with Chinese people on the other side of the door. But, obviously, the man doesn’t really understand the Chinese language at all. Searle said this is just like an artificially intelligent program running on a computer. The program follows a set of rules to determine what to do, but like the man in the room, it can never have a real awareness of what is going on in the outside world.
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